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"By the time I can take people out to where Hubble is looking, they won't be human anymore, by a long way."
- Larry Niven
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| Speaker Chips | ||
| Integrated circuit chips placed in books; they could read the book and advertise it. |
I think I can wait for this product. It is bad enough that bookstores place little slivers of metal here and there in the book, as antitheft devices.
| Without thinking, Kaye turned right and found herself in the religious section. Most of the shelves were filled with brightly colored apocalypse novels. The E-paper holograms leaped from lurid covers as she passed: endtime, rapture, revelation, demons and dark angels. Most of the books had speaker chips that could read out the entire story. The same chips replaced jacket copy with vocal come-ons. The shelves murmured softly in a wave, like ghosts triggered by Kaye's brief passage. |
| Technovelgy from Darwin's Children,
by Greg Bear. Published by Del Rey in 2003 Additional resources -
|
You can actually find real things like this on shelves in stores - just not in United States. I saw a light saber that a friend of mine had purchased for his son in Japan. The light saber had a voice chip installed inside it; when you bought the device in its original package, the light saber was connected to the package. You could push buttons on the outside of the package, and the light saber would tell you, in Japanese, about the product.
I guess I should be glad that those little slivers of metal used as anti-theft devices can't talk. Hearing "I hope you intend to pay for me..." over and over would be irritating.
Compare to the memo-voice from War Game (1959) by Philip K. Dick.
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and Technology by Greg Bear
Tech news articles related to Darwin's Children
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Speaker Chips-related
news articles:
- Product RFID Tags Now Play Jingles
- VW Talking Newspaper Ad
| 'Facetime Facelift' Beautifies Video Chats |
| Meeting Wendy Of Wendy's |
| Narrative Science And Phil Dick's Homeostatic Newspaper |
| BookTrack Adds Sound To Books |
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'Hocus-pocus religions and archaic weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side.'
'Oscar picked up a trowel. 'I'm the tool for the mortar,' the little trowel squeaked cheerfully.'
'... he waited for the robotrix attendant to finish fueling up his ship.'
The Roujin Z system provides care to fully bedridden patients - and then some!
'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
